Rundale

Slí Eile

Who are Slí Eile?

Slí Eile is an all-Ireland anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist group which has co-created Climate Camp Ireland from 2019-2024. This year, Slí Eile took a break from co-organising Climate Camp, and with more time and capacity to collectively analyse the Irish context and engage with more campaigns, we see the urgency with which the State narratives on Irish neutrality, militarisation, and energy need to be fought. By connecting neutrality and the environmental struggle, we hope to support coalition building between anti-imperialist groups, the peace movement, and frontline communities resisting extractivism.

Ireland in the War Machine

We are at a crucial point in Ireland where the contradiction between being a country colonised by Britain, and an increasing willingness to take part in the European war machine is becoming more apparent. Another visible contradiction arises between the Irish people’s deep rooted identification with the Palestinian people and the Irish state’s concrete alignment against Palestine with its complicity in the genocide in Gaza. 

US tech companies in Ireland also work closely with the Zionist state to carry out their colonising agenda of Palestine and the Palestinian people. Project Nimbus is a billion dollar project in which Amazon and Google provide cloud computing infrastructure for the Israeli state, including AI, facial recognition and object tracking for what has been called Israel’s “AI powered genocide and Apartheid“. Both companies have data centres in Ireland which support these services.  Similarly, a Microsoft data centre in Ireland was recently identified as having stored millions of Palestinians’ phone calls, information that has, according to the Guardian’s sources, “facilitated the preparation of deadly airstrikes and has shaped military operations in Gaza and the West Bank“.

Ireland’s economic dependence on tech companies makes the 26 counties’ government and economy subservient to the US and complicit in the worst atrocities being carried out by these imperialist powers today. Daragh Cogley has spoken of this as Ireland’s “double game” – writing that “while the Irish government speaks the language of justice, its material role in Israel’s genocide is amongst the most substantial in the world“. Specifically, he mentions Ireland’s 3.2 billion dollars import of Israeli goods in 2024, which makes Ireland the largest per capita economic supporter of Israel. Of these imported goods, about $3.02bn are “electronic integrated circuits and microassemblies” (commonly refered to as chips or microchips) used in pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturing, but, the large portion of these imported goods is likely destined to Intel’s computer chip manufacturering plant in Leixlip, Co Kildare, who’s sister factory is located in Kiryat Gat, Israel.

Intel has been declared a boycott target and the corporation’s active involvement in the military industrial complex is openly stated. In 2024, Intel announced another partnership with the US’s now-named Department of War “to produce custom and integrated circuits for critical DoD [Department of Defense] systems“. However, whether or not Intel’s manufactoring plants in Ireland and Israel are internally transfering goods to take advantage of Irish tax benefits is not clear. What is clear is, as Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie remark, “that this trade is about an economic relationship more so than about specific goods or services consumed or performed in Ireland”.

The government’s reluctance in taking meaningful action is the result of an economic dependency built on increasingly more militarised foreign direct investment (FDI), drawn largely from US corporations, that use Irish FDI policy to extend their neocolonial profiteering and war economy. 

Ecology & Militarism

Central to our analysis is that the current imperialist struggle is fought in ways that are not just military, but also economic, ecological, and ideological. While the government actively undermines the small amount of military neutrality that is still left, a broader perspective that includes the economic and extractivist processes occurring across the island shows how deeply embedded the Irish economy already is within the structures of imperialism. 

The development of these extractivist projects in Ireland should also be seen as deeply entwined with the ongoing experience of colonisation on the island. Specifically, they should be viewed as particularly connected to the power of a comprador class in Ireland – that is, the political and economic class who act as agents for multinational corporations in Ireland, a formation that has its roots in the specific colonial experience of Ireland. Sharae Deckard further outlines the particular ecological formations that are emergent with this colonial history, again underlining the continuity of these structures within the contemporary neoliberal economic regime. 

Whether it is the use of data centres as tools for genocide, the mining for materials for the ongoing drive for militarisation, or the attempts to make Ireland dependent on US fracked gas – the role of this island’s political and economic elites in tying us further into contemporary imperialism is clear. This integration is a result of the country’s continued economic dependence on the world’s capitalist and imperialist powers. These projects should be opposed both because of how destructive they are of the land and the environment, but also because of how they are tools of the world’s most oppressive regimes, and are in deep contradiction with the anti-colonial solidarity that is still so powerful within Irish society.

Ideological Struggle

We also understand this struggle as an ideological one. The states of this island exert dominant control over mainstream media which repeat their claims and take up their ideas uncritically. In need of legitimising consensus from the Irish public, the government repeatedly applies doublespeak, reinforcing its application each time their deliberately obscure language is repeated. 

Official definitions of ‘critical minerals’, ‘defense’, ‘growth’, ‘energy security’, or ‘military neutrality’ are sleights of hand used to control the narrative and shape public opinion. For example, the mining boom in Ireland is presented as a source of so called “critical minerals” for the so called “green transition”. However, in reality Ireland’s land is vital to fuel the war economy and feed US and EU imperial interests. This dominant liberal framing, which positions corporations as our saviours, in fact corrodes all collective social structures necessary to defend against these forces of domination and exploitation, and to carry out the work of repararing relations to the land. 

The growth of the far-right can also be seen from this perspective as an important weapon of contemporary imperialism, channeling the deep alienation and frustration with the status quo into an ideology of reactionary nationalism, racial supremacy, and misogyny, which serves to both divide society and to soak up the energy of social movements and community organisations.

Anti-Imperialist Environmental Organising 

We see the role of social movements as challenging the projects of military, economic and ecological imperialism across the island. This requires movements to see the interconnections between the varied issues with which we are concerned and focus on tackling the driving forces of capitalism and imperialism behind these varied fronts. Such a connection also specifically roots struggles against extractivism within the long tradition of anti-imperialist resistance across the island of Ireland. Going forward, we hope to help build bridges between various campaigns, people and groups, supporting the construction of strong coalitions aimed at dismantling the regimes of domination across the island of Ireland.

The harms of capitalism and imperialism also have to be countered and healed with slow and steady community building, mutual aid, and solidarity. Examples of this can be seen around the island through networks like the Communities Against the Injustices of Mining (CAIM). It is essential to rebuild a communal life which both rejects capitalist principles and offers a real alternative within our current context. We have to find ways to work together, to find unity in the diversity of our tactics, and organise structures that allow for us to sustain ourselves and our communities during this struggle for life and against death. 

Importantly, the construction of this alternative must come from a connection to the deep traditions of resistance and collective life that run through our own society. An example of this is of course the ongoing grassroots struggle against the erasure of the Irish language by the states on both sides of the border, mar a deirtear ‘is tír gan teanga, tír gan anam’.  

We are currently working towards a protest camp in the summer of 2026. This camp will connect environmental and anti-imperialist struggles, focusing on areas of US imperialist activity in Ireland, in relation to the use of Shannon airport as a de facto US military base, the construction of LNG terminals in Kerry and Clare for receiving US fracked gas, and the continued expansion of data centres across the island. 

This camp will act as a space of action, education, and organising against the varied forms of imperialism that these targets represent. In the run up to this camp we will be continuing our work to educate ourselves and our communities, connecting and organising with groups across the island, and improving the material infrastructure necessary for these actions. 

To join us in this work please send an email to slieile@protonmail.com.

Poster from Slí Eile public meeting last September.